Obama did us no favors when he pulled moderate GOP Governor Huntsman, a clean energy advocate, Wall Street opponent, and possible moderate leader for the national GOP, and sent him to China, leaving Utah (and the GOP) at the mercy of the right-wingers. I wonder why he thought the good governor could do more good in China than here in the U.S.? It’s almost as if Obama WANTED to neutralize a leader that might have helped him achieve some of those campaign promises.

Coal mining employs a lot of people here, and efforts to stop it are naturally going to be unpopular. When faced with a choice between science and your job, which would you choose?

Of course, Utah also is an ideal location for solar, geothermal, and wind production. But the technicians who would install and operate these new facilities are NOT the blue collar coal miners who would lose their jobs in such a transition.

Keep in mind, too, that Utah is a diverse and fairly complex state. The same voters that sent these right-wingers to Salt Lake (and Orrin Hatch to DC) repeatedly elected both moderate GOP Huntsman and Blue Dog Dem Matheson– and a Democratic mayor of SLC. They’re not knee-jerk neocons, but they do have concerns.

Brings to mind Facebook’s recent announcement, to great fanfare, of its decision to ‘locate’ a node on their distributed network locally, and that it would ‘create’ thirty-five jobs. It took several blogposts (OK, the local hippie rag ‘online’ isn’t exactly a blog), a letter to the editor and a few heated conversations with those in authority before folks started to get the idea – ain’t nobody ’round here ‘qualified’ to hot swap a hard-drive, and if anyone ‘local’ is hired at all it’ll be to mow the grass. Oh, and those in authority… they prayed for it.

There is a conspiracy, we’re just to busy paying attention to bullshit to pay attention.